Not all Snapshots visible in Volume Shadow Copies

[bjarrett]

Hey Guys,

I have a Freenas mini xl+.

I have a periodic snapshot task set to take a snapshot every hour and last for 5hours on a dataset.
It's working fine and is making snapshots.

I then have a SMB share which has "Enable Shadow Copies" checked.

On an up-to-date Windows 10 machine I'm not able to see all the snapshots as volume shadow copies in Windows Explorer.

It only appears to be listing the oldest snapshot.

What's going on here? How can I see all the snapshots for that dataset in windows explorer?

Thanks!

 

[anodos]

It only shows snapshots in which data changed.

 

[bjarrett]

It only shows snapshots in which data changed.

Thanks Anodos. I had a suspicion about that. But either that's not working or I'm still missunderstanding something.
I made some changes to files at 12:30pm and it then made a 1pm snapshot which should be different than 12:00pm. Yet its still only listing the oldest.

 

[bjarrett]

I manually made a snapshot at 1:25pm to see if it would show up.
Interestingly it doesn't, but it made the 1pm snapshot appear. Changes were made at 12:30pm between the 12:00pm and 1pm snapshot.

\

It is only listing snapshots which have a USED file size.
I guess i need to read more about what that means exactly.

 

[anodos]

Used basically indicates the number of blocks unique to a given snapshot. This means you can end up with situations where multiple snapshots have zero "used". The module should show at least one of the snapshots in the case that multiple have zero size. I might double-check the logic there, but generally speaking this is a "problem" observed when doing artificial tests on snapshots.